Then came his birth. I had planned to deliver at a birthing center — a midwife, a doula, something calm and intentional. Instead, I labored for 48 hours without medication before transferring to the hospital, where I finally got an epidural hoping to rest and deliver vaginally. Sixty hours after it all began, my son was born by urgent c-section because his heart rate kept dropping with every contraction. I didn’t have words for how that felt afterward. I didn’t even think of it as traumatic — I just kept moving. It wasn’t until therapy, months later, that I understood how much I had been grieving.

The months that followed were relentless. I struggled to breastfeed. I developed de Quervain’s tenosynovitis — severe wrist and thumb pain that made it agonizing to hold, lift, and care for my own baby — and eventually required surgery to get relief.

Everything felt enormous. A small decision felt like a crisis. Quiet moments felt like threats. I was drowning in a life that looked fine from the outside, and I had been drowning since before he arrived.

Nine months postpartum, I drove myself to the emergency room because I was having suicidal thoughts and I knew I needed help. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was also the bravest.

What brought me back wasn’t one thing. It was therapy, and medication, and faith, and eventually — other mothers. Women who had been exactly where I was and who said, without flinching: I know. I’ve been there. You’re going to be okay. That combination saved my life.

Bloom Through Motherhood exists because I looked for that kind of support and had to fight to find it. No mother should have to fight that hard — not during pregnancy, not in the delivery room, not in the long and brutal stretch that follows. Perinatal mental health disorders are the most common complication of pregnancy, and most mothers face them alone, in silence, convinced they are the only one.

You are not the only one. I know because I was one of you.

I founded Bloom here in Upstate South Carolina because this is my community, and because I believe the most powerful thing one mother can say to another is: me too. Our peer supporters aren’t experts who read about this in a textbook. They’re women who lived it — and came out the other side.

If you’re in the middle of it right now — whether you’re still pregnant, newly postpartum, or nine months in and barely holding on — I see you. This organization was built for you, by someone who needed it first.